Digital pen and paper technology has provided tremendous opportunities to consumers. Digital paper is paper with printed patterns embedded thereon. These patterns may or may not be visible to an observer. That is, in some instances the patterns are printed using infrared ink onto the surface of the paper, such that the patterns are observable to infrared cameras but not to an observer's eyes. A digital pen includes a camera that captures images representing select patterns or select portions of the patterns recorded on the digital paper. The image is translated into coordinate values in order to resolve the digital pen's position over a surface of the digital paper. When obtaining the position, the orientation of the digital pen is also resolved.
Calculating a digital pen's true position and orientation over the surface of digital paper presents unique opportunities, such as permitting an artist's drawings to be digitally captured, permitting a writer's handwriting to be captured and possibly automatically translated into electronic data structures (e.g., characters, etc.), and the like. However, resolving the position is a restrictive exercise because often the algorithm to decode the position is dependent upon sizes originally selected for encoding the patterns on the digital paper. Thus, digital paper having patterns of sizes 5×5 are generally not compatible with digital pens that capture blocks of sizes 6×6. Moreover, this incompatibility for different pattern sizes exists even when the patterns themselves are the same.